Casey Seiler: A crack in the helmet

It was a medium-wide trail with plenty of snow. I caught an edge, went down on my belly and skidded off the trail and collided head-first into a tree.

If I hadn't been wearing a helmet, you wouldn't be reading this column. Even with a helmet on, it's a flat-out New Testament miracle that I didn't end up with a concussion or worse. I spat out the mouthful of snow and oh-so-slowly rolled over. I wiggled my toes. I flexed by gloved hands. I stood up, feeling a little like a cartoon character struck with a sledgehammer that tucks head down between shoulder blades.

Two other skiers came up alongside. "That looked pretty bad — are you OK?" one said.

"I think so," I said, gasping slightly from either the chest-first fall, the mouthful of snow or mortal terror. "I got the wind knocked out of me."

They offered to get the ski patrol, which would have definitely resulted in my completing my day strapped into a sled with my head and neck secured by foam and tape, headed to the base of the hill and a waiting ambulance.

Recovered sufficiently to be more concerned about potentially wasting the three-day lift pass I had purchased merely two hours before, and fortified by my ability to post-hole 10 feet up the slope to recover my runaway ski, I politely declined the offer, took a few more deep breaths, and proceeded on my way.

This happened three months ago this week in Utah, where I was out with a group of friends and their sons. I wasn't hot-dogging and I wasn't going too fast — indeed, I was taking this run by myself in order to avoid overdoing things on our first day. I had just caught an edge.

The National Ski Areas Association reported that 37 skiers or snowboarders died at U.S. ski areas in the 2017-18 season, the majority of them male (that's me) skiers (check) under the age of 30 (decidedly no check) on intermediate terrain (check). "Collisions with other guests and stationary objects continue to be the primary cause of skier/snowboarder fatalities," the NSAA reported. Almost two-thirds of people who died in such accidents that season were wearing helmets. (The group's next report will note that three men, all under 28, died at Hunter Mountain this season within a two-month span.)

Those who have had this sort of close call will be familiar with the low-boil brand of PTSD that will stick with you for weeks afterward. If you've nearly been sideswiped by a semi on a two-lane road, your monkey brain will conjure up a head-on collision and play it periodically in a nasty loop. If you've skied into a tree, you might find yourself trying to calculate how much more impact your spine could have sustained without snapping.

Dashiell Hammett writes about this phenomenon in my favorite passage from "The Maltese Falcon," which in all other respects is a guided missile of plot. Detective Sam Spade tells seemingly imperiled damsel Brigid O'Shaughnessy the story of a Tacoma real estate agent named Flitcraft who had one day disappeared "like a fist when you open your hand" — surely one of the greatest similes in Western lit.

Tracked down by Spade, Flitcraft told the shamus that on the day of his disappearance he had been walking down the street and had narrowly avoided being struck by a steel beam that fell from a building under construction. "He was scared stiff of course, (Flitcraft) said, but he was more shocked than really frightened," Spade recounts. "He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works. ... He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them."

This sense of precariousness can be seen thousands of times every day if you're observant or perhaps dumb enough to go looking for it. Consider the recent case of Josh Woodward, the firefighter who checked into St. Peter's Hospital's emergency department with a pain in his arm and spent weeks battling a sepsis infection that cost him a hand and all of his toes. Two months after the start of that ordeal, he was recovered enough to be celebrated last week by his co-workers at Albany International Airport's fire station in the company of his wife, who chronicled every twist in his medical nightmare on social media. Compared to what Woodward has been through, I'll be happy to bounce myself off trees all day long.

Spade's story ends with wonderful irony: Having walked out of one life, Flitcraft eventually settles into a new one that resembles his former existence.

"He adjusted himself to beams falling," Spade says, "and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling."

And so I skied the rest of that day and the two days that followed, and took Advil and stretched and ate well. On the afternoon of the last day, my 15-year-old boot blew out at the toe. Like a helmet, ski boots should not let in the elements. On the trip home, I was delayed by a blizzard overnight in Chicago and fell asleep stretched out on one of those obdurate terminal benches — a sure test that your back is at least relatively hardy.

I have not replaced my boots yet, but I will. In the interim, I went hiking with a friend of mine last week to the top of Mount Marcy. Or near the top, where the wind was scouring and our snowshoe tracks disappeared 10 feet behind us.

Casey Seiler is the Times Union's editor. He previously served as managing editor, Capitol Bureau chief and entertainment editor. He is a longtime contributor to WMHT's weekly political roundup "New York Now."

Before arriving in Albany in 2000, Seiler worked at the Burlington Free Press in Vermont and the Jackson Hole Guide in Wyoming.

A graduate of Northwestern University, Seiler is a Buffalo native who grew up in Louisville, Ky. He lives in Albany's lovely Pine Hills.